Righteous Anger: On grief, outrage, and what faithfulness demands when video contradicts power 

A Woman Dies on a Minneapolis Street

Renee Good was 37 years old. A widow. A mother to a 15, 12, and a six-year-old. A Christian who, in her youth, went on mission trips. A college graduate. A US Citizen. Pictures from the inside of the car that she died in showed stuffed animals in her glove compartment. She is a daughter leaving behind a grieving mom.

By now, we have all seen the videos of what happened. Her wife crying out in pain, holding their dog, grasping to understand the events as they unfolded right before her eyes.

On a day when ICE agents flooded Minneapolis, she turned her vehicle sideways to block their trucks in an effort to protect people within her community. 

Within moments, ICE officers surrounded the vehicle, trying to pull her out. Masked men, yelling and cussing while pulling at her door handle, were trying to grab her out of her vehicle. She turned the wheel, attempting to flee. An agent fired four or five shots point-blank at her head.  Officers refused to render aid. A doctor on scene was prevented from helping when ICE agents pulled guns and told him to back away. NO ICE AGENTS rendered aid. EMS was not allowed in and had to walk and carry her body “like a sack of potatoes” as one witness said, instead of using a stretcher.

Then the lies began.

First, she was a “domestic terrorist.” Fox News reported she used pronouns—as if pronouns explained her death, as if their use was an indictment. 

“She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over,” Trump said, contradicted by video footage of the incident from multiple angles. Trump doubled down on that falsehood: “She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over,” he insisted.

The videos circulated showing the officer firing from the side of the vehicle, not from in front. The claim that she was “trying to run him over” contradicted what millions could see with their own eyes. Memes begin to flood social media showing George Orwell’s quote from 1984.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,”

Reports today say the FBI is blocking the state access to investigate the incident.  The mayor and governor demanded ICE accountability. The federal government refused accountability.

And across the WORLD, people watched the videos, read the statements, and felt something rise in their chests.

Was it righteous, that anger? Is it justified? What are we supposed to do with it?

The Question of Righteous Anger

“Righteous anger” is a phrase we use casually, but it carries philosophical and theological weight that demands examination. Let me offer a working definition:

Righteous anger is moral indignation arising from perceived injustice, where the anger is proportionate, appropriately directed, and motivated by genuine concern for what is right rather than mere personal affront.

It may also be referred to as “Holy Anger.” The critical question is whether such anger can be justified, useful, or virtuous—or whether anger always distorts and destroys, regardless of its cause. This question has  occupied philosophers for millennia. The answers diverge sharply.

Aristotle: The Virtue of Proper Anger

Aristotle, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued that anger is not inherently wrong. In fact, the person who never feels anger at injustice is morally deficient—”slavish,” unable to defend themselves or others.

For Aristotle, virtuous anger requires calibration:

• Right object: Be angry at things that warrant anger
• Right target: Direct anger at those actually responsible
• Right degree: Match intensity to the offense
• Right timing: Feel it when appropriate, not nursing old wounds
• Right duration: Let it end when it has served its purpose

He wrote: “The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised.”

In modern terms: Good anger hits the right target, with the right intensity, at the right time, and knows when to stop. The person who witnesses injustice and feels nothing is not virtuous—they are numb, complicit, or broken.

A woman was killed by ICE agents under circumstances that video evidence suggests were unjustified. Officials then lied about what happened. Aristotle would ask: Is anger at this warranted? If the killing was disproportionate, the lies deliberate, the obstruction calculated—then yes. Failing to feel anger might indicate moral failure.

But Aristotle would also ask: Is your anger proportionate? Rightly directed? Will it end when justice is served, or will it consume you?

The Stoics: Against Anger Itself

The Stoic philosophers—Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius—rejected Aristotle’s framework entirely. For the Stoics, anger is always irrational. It rests on false judgments about what matters. The wise person recognizes injustice, acts to address it if possible, but does so from reason rather than passion.

Seneca called anger “brief madness.” It destroys the angry person first, clouds judgment, and rarely produces the justice it seeks.

The Stoic counsel: See clearly what happened in Minneapolis. Name it as wrong. Act rationally to seek change. But do not let anger take root in your soul. The officer’s actions harm him morally; your rage harms you.

There is some wisdom here. Social media amplifies outrage into something corrosive. The endless scroll of videos, hot takes, and fury can leave us exhausted without having accomplished anything. Anger sustained too long becomes poison.

But is the Stoic answer sufficient? When the federal government kills and lies, is equanimity the appropriate response? Or does it risk becoming complicity dressed as wisdom?

Thomas Aquinas: Christian Anger

As Christians, how do we respond? I wanted to look at historical reasoning. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century theologian, built on Aristotle while filtering everything through Christian faith. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas asks directly: 

Is anger always sinful? His answer: No.

He distinguishes between ira vitiosa (sinful anger): disordered, excessive, seeking undue revenge; and ira per zelum (zealous anger): ordered by reason, seeking just correction.

Aquinas points to Christ himself. When Jesus drove the money changers from the temple, overturning tables and wielding a whip, he was angry. “Zeal for your house will consume me,” Jesus said quoting Psalm 69:9 in John 2:17. This anger was not sin. It was holy.

More striking still, Aquinas argues that failure to feel anger at injustice is itself sinful. He quotes John Chrysostom: “Whoever is not angry when there is cause for anger, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices.”

Read that again. Unreasonable patience. The refusal to be angry when anger is warranted, fosters evil. It incites the wicked. It abandons the wronged.

For Aquinas, righteous anger must be:

• Directed at genuine injustice
• Proportionate to the wrong
• Governed by reason, not passion alone
• Aimed at correction and justice, not revenge

The killing of Renee Good appears disproportionate, four or five shots to the head for blocking traffic. The lies compound the injustice. The lies prevent accountability.

Aquinas would say: Anger at this is not only permitted but required of the morally serious person. The question is whether that anger is governed by reason and aimed at justice.

James Cone: The Cross and the Lynching Tree

James Cone was a Black theologian who spent his life asking what Christianity means for the oppressed. His masterwork, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, makes an argument that haunts:

The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other.

Jesus was executed by the state. The Roman Empire killed him publicly, shamefully, as a warning to others. The official story was that he was a criminal, a threat, and dangerous.

For nearly a century, Black Americans were lynched by the thousands. Killed publicly, shamefully, as warnings to others. The official story was always that they were criminals, threats, and dangerous.

The pattern repeats.

Cone insists that when we see government violence against the vulnerable—when officials kill and then lie about the killing—we are watching the crucifixion happen again. The faces change. The structure remains.

A woman engaged in an act of protection, trying to shield vulnerable people from federal agents. ICE killed her. Then the federal government called her disturbed and a terrorist. Some media outlets portray her as a deviant. Her sexuality was invoked as if it were evidence of guilt. Cone would recognize this. The lynching tree has many branches. The lies that follow state violence are always the same: She deserved it. She brought it on herself. She was dangerous.

And Cone would say: Christian faithfulness requires naming this for what it is. Anger at the crucifixion is not unchristian. It is recognizing what the gospel demands.

The Monopoly of Violence

We cannot discuss federal government killing without addressing a structural reality. Max Weber, the sociologist, defined the government as “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

This is descriptive, not moral. The federal government claims that its violence is legitimate by definition. Others’ violence is criminal. But this creates a profound problem: When the federal government itself commits injustice, where can victims appeal?

ICE killed this woman. DHS declared her a terrorist. The government’s monopoly on legitimate violence means it also claims a monopoly on the legitimate narrative about that violence.

Your eyes don’t matter. Videos don’t matter. The state says what happened, and that is what happened.

This is not merely lying. Hannah Arendt identified it as characteristic of totalitarianism: not just asserting false things, but destroying the concept of factual truth itself.

The message is: We can say whatever we want. Your evidence is irrelevant. Truth is what power says it is. Trump said this himself, just this week, in an interview with the New York Times, when he said there are no limits on his power despite his own morals.

If anger is ever righteous, it is righteous here—not only at the killing, but at the lies that follow, at the assault on truth itself. God finds lying as detestable. 

“Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, but those who deal truthfully are His delight” Proverbs 12:22

“There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.” Proverbs 6:16-19

Grief Before Anger

I want to pause on something important.

When I first encountered this story, I didn’t feel anger. I felt grief. Exhaustion. Pure sadness watching so many struggle to come to terms with what happened. Social Media punches you in the gut in so many ways when the devalueing of human life is shown so explicitly on the screen.

The first video I saw was the wife…hysterical, with their dog, having just watched her best friend murdered. That image doesn’t produce outrage. It produces sorrow. The kind of sorrow that sits in your chest and doesn’t know where to go.

Philosophers talk endlessly about anger at injustice. They talk less about grief. Judith Butler has written that grief reveals our fundamental interdependence. When we grieve, we acknowledge that we are bound up with others, that their loss diminishes us. Grief at injustice honors the victim in a way that anger sometimes doesn’t.

Anger wants to do something. Grief simply acknowledges what has been lost.

Perhaps grief needs to come first. Perhaps, the rush to anger, especially the performed anger of social media, is sometimes a way of avoiding the harder work of mourning. I know I suffer from this sharing endlessly people’s videos and take as my journalistic core wants what happened to be communicated to all instead of the media bias shielding so that only one perspective or narrative is shown.

The grief is not a stepping stone to outrage. It is its own truth. It deserves space.

Is Righteous Anger Justified Here?

So now, we come to the point of wrestling through different schools of thought. I have walked through Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquinas, Cone, Weber, Butler. Let me now offer my synthesis.

Yes, anger at this event is justified.

God commands us to pursue justice, care for the oppressed, the immigrants, the widows and even the orphans. The six year old child lost his mom yesterday after losing his veteran dad in 2023. We should grieve the losses. 

 

By Aristotle’s criteria:

• The object is genuine injustice: disproportionate killing followed by lies.
• The target is identifiable: the ICI agent who fired, the officials who lied, the system that protects them
• The timing is appropriate: this is a fresh incident, unresolved and demanding response.
• The duration remains open: until accountability is achieved, sustained anger may be warranted

By Aquinas’s criteria:

• The injustice is real
• The anger can be governed by reason
• The aim can be justice rather than revenge
• Failure to be angry would be moral negligence

By Cone’s framework:

• This is the crucifixion pattern: government violence against the vulnerable, followed by official lies
• Christian faithfulness requires naming it
• Anger is participation in God’s own anger at injustice

But anger is not enough, and anger has dangers.

The Stoics are right that anger can consume and distort. Social media amplifies outrage into something corrosive—performed fury that exhausts without accomplishing.

Aristotle is right that anger must be proportionate and time-limited. Rage that becomes identity, that cannot end, that seeks destruction rather than justice—this is vice, not virtue.

Aquinas is right that anger must be governed by reason and ordered toward correction. Anger that delights in punishment, that wants the guilty to suffer rather than to be held accountable, has crossed into sin.

And grief must not be skipped.

The woman who died had a family, children, a life. Stuffed animals in her glove compartment. The rush to outrage can obscure the simple, terrible fact: a person is dead who should not be dead. Honoring her may require sitting with sorrow before, or alongside, mobilizing anger.

What Does Faithfulness Look Like?

If anger is justified, what should it produce? Here I speak particularly to those who claim Christian faith, though the questions extend beyond any single tradition.

Speak truth.

The official narrative is a lie. Videos show what happened. Faithfulness requires refusing to accept the lie, even when power insists on it. The prophets spoke truth to power at great cost. Sometimes that is what faith demands.

Grieve with those who grieve.

“Jesus Wept” John 11:35

Before strategy and action, there is a widow with a dog and a six-year-old without a mother and father and a 12 and 15 year old without their mom. The ministry of presence, simply being with those who suffer, is not a preliminary to real work. It is real work.

Pursue justice through available means.

He has told you, O man, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8

Support investigation. Demand accountability. Use legal and political channels. Organize sustained pressure. This is not faithlessness in divine justice. It is participating in it.

Resist the deformation of anger.

Anger that becomes hatred of persons rather than opposition to injustice has curdled. Anger that cannot imagine redemption for the guilty has abandoned the gospel. Anger that delights in destruction has become the thing it opposes.

The Christian tradition holds these in tension: fierce opposition to injustice alongside recognition that the unjust are also human, also broken, also in need of grace. This is impossibly difficult. It may be what faithfulness requires.

Examine your own heart.

But the LORD replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”Jonah 4:4

Why are you angry? Is it genuine moral concern, or is some portion performance for social approval? Is it proportionate to the wrong, or has it become disproportionate because anger feels powerful in a world where you feel powerless? Is it aimed at justice, or has revenge crept in? These questions are not meant to suppress anger. They are meant to purify it.

A Final Word

A woman is dead. Her family watched her die. Her children will grow up without her.

The federal government killed her and called her a terrorist. The President spoke a false narrative. The evidence was dismissed. And we are left with videos on our phones, outrage in our feeds, and the question of what to do with all of it.

I believe righteous anger at this is justified. By the standards of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Cone—by any serious moral framework I know—this warrants indignation. But I also believe anger is not the only faithful response, and perhaps not the first one.

Grief honors what was lost. Prayer sustains what action cannot. Truth-telling resists the lie. Justice-seeking channels anger into change. Solidarity accompanies those who suffer.

And somewhere in the mix, the hardest Christian teaching waits: that even those who killed and lied bear the image of God. That accountability is not the same as vengeance. That we are not permitted to become the evil we oppose.

I don’t know how to hold all of this together. I suspect it requires community…people who remind us of what we’re prone to forget, who temper our excesses and strengthen our resolve.

What I know is this: A woman blocked federal trucks to protect vulnerable people. She was killed for it. Then she was slandered.

If this doesn’t warrant anger, nothing does.

If this doesn’t warrant grief, we have lost something essential.

If this doesn’t warrant truth-telling, we have surrendered to the lie.

May we have the courage for all three.